Russia: Managing Contradictions

9 Russia: managing contradictions James Sherr By the time new American presidents have settled into the White House, they usually understand one thing about Russia: it is a difficult country to live with. But it usually takes them a full term to discover something else: Russia is a museum of contradictory truths.1 The country’s power has always concealed anxiety. Its weaknesses have always shrouded ambition. Its Eurasian expanse and perspective instils, in equal measure, a sense of vulnerability and prominence, a ‘right’ to ‘equality’ in all regions to which it is proximate and a demand for pre-eminence in areas that are historically its own. Even during the relatively congenial mid-1990s, Russia was too distinct and too proud to ‘simply dissolve into the schema of European diplomacy’ (in the words of Boris Yeltsin’s press secretary in 1994).2 Yet apart from the period of Leninist messianism, it has never possessed the distinctiveness, self-confidence or cultural integrity to become, like China or India, ‘the other’ with respect to Europe. Like an only child needing company and fearing intrusion at the same time, Russia seeks a seat at the top table of today’s European and Euro-Atlantic clubs, while claiming exemptions from the values and standards that make them clubs. To the Russian mind, contradiction is part of life itself, and life’s complexi- ties and ironies call for contradictory thoughts and approaches. To the American mind, contradictory thoughts are a sign of stupidity and contradictory approaches a sign of guile. But this is an attitude that Russians find difficult to comprehend. The United States has been unique in its ability to dominate international institutions and stand apart from them. Long before the George W. Bush administration, Russians marvelled at America’s apparently presumptive right to lead the world and, without any shame at the inconsistency, heap opprobrium on Russia for trying to remain ‘leader of stability and security’ over the finite terri- tory that it once possessed. Russians have no difficulty adding colour to this picture. From their vantage point, the United States is a country absolute about defending its own sovereignty but strident in warning others that ‘sovereignty is no defence’; carefree in equating itself with the ‘international community’ but ready to disregard that community (and the UN) the moment its national interests intervene; passionate in elevating democracy to a universal norm but assiduous in financing and arming autocratic, kleptocratic and despotic allies in 162 CHP_Niblett_10_Ch9.indd 162 23/02/2010 12:35 Russia the pursuit of ‘energy security’ or the ‘war on terror’. From Russia’s perspective, the United States has mastered the contradictions of life very well. The Russian image of American hypocrisy, part parody but part reality, overlooks another reality: the widespread attractiveness of the United States and the alliances and institutions that it has formed, inspired or led. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has occasionally led with bravado, but more often with sobriety and occasionally with reluctance. Some of its alliances (with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for example) have added to the stock of antipathies and turbulence in parts of the world undergoing (for reasons that transcend US policy) convulsive clashes between modernity and its opponents. Yet America’s core alliances in Europe, the Far East and Australasia have made a profound contribution to the security, stability and prosperity of regions and operate with a degree of collegiality that has few precedents in history. Its allies might wish the United States were wiser, but they rarely have wished it to be weaker. Since 1991, the Russian Federation has been spared many of the dilemmas and burdens that a global power faces. Its relationship with its own allies (and those who resist alliance with it) is burdened by the Soviet legacy – macabre and sanguinary by any comparison to American ‘hegemonism’ – by its ambivalences towards that legacy and by its very old-fashioned craving for respect. Although Russian negative perceptions of the United States have a long pedigree, they have achieved an unusual piquancy in recent years, and it is no exaggeration to say that President Barack Obama took office at a uniquely low point in the post-Cold War US–Russian relationship. Ironically, this decline is less attributable to the Bush administration’s policy towards Russia than to the resonances generated by its policies elsewhere: the western Balkans, Iraq and, not least, NATO enlargement and missile defence. So far, the last two have been regarded as ‘anti-Russian’ by definition, irrespective of any evidence provided or explanation offered, and this imperviousness to evidence and explanation already constitutes one of the main challenges facing the new US administration. the elusiveness of trust It would be entirely artificial to pick one defining moment that marked the deterioration in the US–Russia relationship since the last period of high expectations in the weeks and months following 11 September 2001. The Rose and Orange Revolutions of 2003–04 were clearly profoundly important watersheds. Midway between these two upheavals, President Vladimir Putin darkly hinted that Western governments were complicit in the slaughter of schoolchildren in the town of Beslan in 2004.3 Nevertheless, the Western political class as a whole did not come to terms with the depth of the divide until Putin’s speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference on 10 February 2007. Since then, a key question on the minds of those who are now working in the Obama administration has been whether trust can be restored. For minimalists in that administration, the ‘resetting’ of relations is designed to explore the degree to which this is possible; 163 CHP_Niblett_10_Ch9.indd 163 23/02/2010 12:35 America and a Changed World for maximalists, the restoration of trust is assumed to be possible, and the ‘reset’ is designed to restore it. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that there have been only two periods of mutual trust since 1991 and that both were based on unrealistic expectations. American expectations during the first period, which extended roughly from 1991 to 1994, were conditioned not only by triumphalist and historicist thinking, but by American experience. Political establishments in the United States and most European countries had long persuaded themselves that capitalism, prosperity and liberalism went hand in hand. Far too many politi- cians, officials and consultants ignored far too many warnings that in Russia, the absence of civic traditions and effective institutions would produce rigged markets rather than free markets, the transformation of unaccountable bureau- cratic power into unaccountable financial power and illicit alliances between the state, business and organized crime. In their more hopeful beliefs the architects of Western policy were encouraged by the self-designated liberals and economic radicals who featured so prominently in President Yeltsin’s initial policy team. Western triumphalism and Russian ‘romanticism’ reinforced one another in ways that became increasingly unwelcome to those outside this magic circle. Far from helping Russia through the ‘birth pangs of democracy’, the pronounced character of Western support for Boris Yeltsin’s reformers and their narrowly macro-economic model of reform made the United States an inadvertent protagonist in a process that, not for the first time, gradually persuaded much of the country, ‘not for the first time in Russian history, that Western models and values are irrelevant, if not downright harmful, to their peculiarly Russian circumstances and predicaments’.4 Western governments were also wrong to assume that, once the dust settled, Russia would be reconciled to the post-Cold War status quo. In 1992, Russia acquired borders that it had never possessed before and which, to much of the country, made no sense in economic, security or civilizational terms. Far from regarding these realities as a new and legitimate status quo, the ‘liberal’ leadership regarded them as temporary.5 The first Foreign Ministry report on the subject in September 1992 defined the integration of the former Soviet space as a ‘vital interest’ to be pursued by ‘all legitimate means’, including ‘divide and influence policies’.6 Very few at the time regarded this as an anti-Western interest. To the contrary, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev and others believed that Russia’s integration into the West would prove to be the antidote to Soviet disintegra- tion and provide the basis for reintegration on ‘democratic’, post-Soviet terms, with US support.7 The ‘Russia first’ policy prevalent in Washington and other Western capitals until the mid-1990s did nothing to discourage them. Nor did it discourage the hopes of Russia’s liberals that the end of confrontation would lead to an ‘equal’ position for Russia in Europe: in other words, veto-wielding prerogatives in decision-making on matters of pan-European importance. By the time the liberals, pejoratively dismissed as ‘romantics’, were moved aside by the more traditional ‘centrists’ of the Russian establishment, warnings of a divergence of perspective between Russia and its Western partners had become 164 CHP_Niblett_10_Ch9.indd 164 23/02/2010 12:35 Russia not only evident but ‘loud’.8 It was not in 2004 but 1994 (at the start of NATO’s UN-sanctioned bombing campaign in Bosnia) that Boris Yeltsin told

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